Joy Williams

  • culture June/July/Aug 2021

    Reading the Fine Print

    ROBERT WALSER WAS A SWISS WRITER of the early twentieth century who wanted very much to be a German writer. He walked and walked more than he wrote and wrote, covering thousands of miles in his lifetime, albeit within limited territory. In the beginning his garb was clownish—“a wretched bright yellow midsummer suit, light dancing shoes, an intentionally vulgar, insolent, foolish hat”—near the end a motley of patched rags, and at the very end a shabby but proper suit and overcoat, his death duds when he collapsed in 1956 in the snow near the mental asylum where he had resided for twenty-three

  • culture Apr/May 2020

    Evidence of Things Not Seen

    WHENEVER I SEE A COPY OF A ROBERT STONE NOVEL in a used-book store, I buy it, pretty much to introduce him to others, to press his work upon others. I recently acquired a copy of A Flag for Sunrise, one of his masterworks—1981 first edition. Out of print. Nine dollars. Between its pages, a folded note. Black ink. Neat handwriting. Life is hard. We’re trying to prepare you for that. Make mistakes . . . fine . . . good. But make them because you don’t know. Learn from them. Do not make them b/c your friends are making them. Anxiety: valid. But don’t give in. How you face it will help make you

  • fiction Feb/Mar 2018

    Dead Reckonings

    IN TATYANA TOLSTAYA’S EARLIER SHORT-STORY COLLECTION, White Walls, a character remarks, “If a person is dead, that’s for a long time; if he’s stupid, that’s forever.”

    This was marvelous, I thought, one of those wise, wise Russian sayings.

    I mentioned this to a friend.

    “Oh that’s all over the internet,” she said.

    “Really?” That was disappointing.

    She produced her device and paddled her finger across it like people do and said, “See? Here.”

    “When you’re dead you don’t know that you’re dead, and it’s the same when you’re stupid,” the screen reported.

    “But that’s entirely different,” I

  • culture June/July/Aug 2017

    Appetite for Destruction

    The unusually striking photograph on the cover of Mary V. Dearborn’s new biography Ernest Hemingway shows the writer in his prime in 1933 sitting on the cushioned stern of a boat, possibly his thirty-eight-foot cabin cruiser the Pilar, and aiming a pistol at the camera. He always carried guns on board to shoot sharks or, when bored or annoyed, seabirds and turtles. He was thirty-four when this photo was taken and he had recently discovered Key West and the fabulous Gulf Stream with its gigantic marlin, sailfish, and tarpon. He fished and fished and fished, insatiable. There were the heroic

  • politics Sept/Oct/Nov 2016

    Do We Really Need to Talk About Dylan?

    In 2012 Sue Klebold and her husband Tom popped up in Andrew Solomon’s deliriously received Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity, talking about their love for their son Dylan, who with his friend Eric Harris shot and killed twelve students and a teacher and injured twenty-four others at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. Both seniors, they had been planning to blow up the school and kill many more, but the bombs they built didn’t go off. Sue Klebold said some rather startling things in Solomon’s book, such as “I am glad I had kids and glad I had the kids

  • fiction Dec/Jan 2016

    Connect the Sots

    Lucia Berlin was born November 12, 1936, and she died on November 12 sixty-eight years later, which suggests a tidiness to her time on this earth that her time on this earth certainly did not exhibit. She lived in Alaska, Chile, Mexico, and the American Southwest, loved her sister and loathed her mother, had severe scoliosis and a very large drinking problem. She was forever getting married to cads or addicts and had four sons whom she pretty much raised herself, supporting them through a series of crummy jobs—switchboard operator, ER attendant, cleaning woman. From the ’70s through the ’90s,

  • print June/July/Aug 2015

    The Interpretation of Screams

    THE MAN WHO LOVED CHILDREN was published seventy-five years ago, and it remains one of the most aggressive, extraordinary, preposterously sustained, and imaginative novels ever written, even though the characters and much of the situation were based on people their author, Christina Stead, knew intimately. It seems that Stead created her family of Pollits out of sheer writerly wizardry, so grotesque and alive are they—Henny, the vicious, hysterical mother; Sam, the narcissistic, pontificating father; Louie, the dumpy, dreary issue of an earlier marriage and the brilliant, suffering, sullen

  • culture July 09, 2013

    Kafka: The Years of Insight

    Kafka was always burning his stuff, or threatening to, or demanding that others do it for him. He asked at least three women to marry him, but something always came up to thwart the nuptials. (Once it was the beginning of World War I.) One of his obsessions for a time was the sassy Milena Jesenska, who called him Frank. “Frank cannot live,” she wrote to Brod. “Frank does not have the capacity for living. . . . He is absolutely incapable of living, just as he is incapable of getting drunk.”